What's happened to the titans of big tech?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2022
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Big tech is facing a big moment. With plummeting stock prices, and mass lay-offs, the likes of Google, Twitter and Meta are all - for different reasons - facing some tough questions over how they're being run.
Some see this as primarily a result of post-pandemic blues, the rise in interest rates, and a general cost-of-living crisis affecting the business environment. However, Twitter and Meta especially have seen wholesale desertions by a number of major advertisers, worried about the regulation of hate speech, and therefore by association the safety of brands' reputations.
Does this mark a deeper crisis for the ad-based business model of the major social media platforms? And what can they do about it?
Presenter / Producer: Ed Butler Image: Phones; Credit: Getty
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | World Football in Qatar is the podcast taking you behind the scenes with all 32 teams at the World Cup. |
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| 0:19.4 | Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:24.1 | Hi there. My name's Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily here on the BBC World Service, |
| 0:29.1 | where today it seems all is not well in Silicon Valley. Big Tech has shed three trillion |
| 0:35.0 | dollars in value, which is the GDP of a Latin American nation. |
| 0:39.3 | The hero was turned to the villain. |
| 0:41.3 | So it's sort of a perfect storm of bad things for big tech. |
| 0:44.3 | Yes, with Google, Meta and Twitter among famous corporate names |
| 0:48.3 | seeing collapsing share values, we're asking, is it the guys in charge that's to blame? |
| 0:59.2 | What we're dealing with here, Ed, is an industry where no one knows what is going on. |
| 1:08.9 | It's brand unsafe. Ad tech companies are doing bad business. And what that implies is that we are in a digital advertising bubble. |
| 1:11.0 | Big strife in big tech. |
| 1:13.1 | That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:19.8 | There's been a lot of this lately on the global news media. |
| 1:29.1 | The social media platform Twitter is now in the hands of the world's richest person, |
| 1:34.8 | with questions over whether its new owner will loosen regulations covering hate speech and misinformation. |
| 1:40.9 | Elon Musk is making more waves after his Twitter takeover, tweeting earlier, |
| 1:44.7 | that Apple has threatened to withhold Twitter from an app store. Elon Musk has told Twitter staff that they must commit to working long hours at high intensity or else leave the company. |
| 1:52.3 | Workers have been told that they needed to click on a link by Thursday evening. |
| 1:56.6 | Yes, the fate of Twitter does seem suddenly quite perilous. |
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